Designing Pedagogy for Multimodal Oral Presentation Skills through a Responsive Case Study

This paper reports on a responsive case study which guided the development of a pedagogical design that was couched within the multiliteracies framework and aimed at developing multimodal oral presentation skills among tertiary English as second language students in a local university. We contend that the responsive case study is a feasible adaptation of conventional action research designs that require several cycles of application which many practitioners cannot implement due to situational constraints of natural classroom settings. The Responsive Multimodal Oral Presentation Pedagogy or RMO2P was employed for 13 weeks in an oral presentation course to explore the extent to which a responsive pedagogy can address different learning needs and unpredictable needs that arise. The findings suggest that RMO2P could enhance learning outcomes in multimodal oral presentation skills such as linguistic ability, oral ability and overall credibility, while engaging students with different levels of linguistic proficiency and different needs. However, the desired outcomes required contributions by the multi-layered integration of multimodal tools with pedagogical techniques, which are informed by multiliteracies principles and managed by teacher responsiveness. These findings are significant for practitioners seeking guidance for teaching multimodal oral presentation skills and researchers who want to embrace praxis through action research. RMO2P’s novelty lies in its practical and adaptable instructional design for multimodal oral presentation skills which can be carried out by an individual teacher.